With nothing to do, Clinkle COO leaves

14 March 2014 | 5427 views | 2

Former Netflix executive Barry McCarthy has quit his job as COO of Clinkle after less than six months in the job at the mysterious payments startup.

Clinkle drew headlines in June when it secured an impressive $25 million in seed funding from an illustrious group of VCs and private investors despite the fact that very little has been revealed about its product.

In October McCarthy, who spent 12 years at online media streaming outfit Netflix, came on board to help build the business. However, while he was told that the app would go live that November it has still not appeared, leaving him with nothing to do.

"They're not nearly as close to scaling the businesses as I thought they were when I came in the door. And that's what I do," McCarthy told Re/code.

In a blog post, Clinkle's 22 year old founder and CEO Lucas Duplan says that McCarthy will continue to act as an advisor to the company and to him personally. Duplan and CFO Mike Liberatore, who joined earlier this year from PayPal, will take on McCarthy's managerial responsibilities.

In his blog post, Duplan also says that the Clinkle app has gone live with real money and is now being tested by friends and family with the plan to get it publicly available on college campuses later this year.

McCarthy isn't the first staffer to leave Clinkle in its short life. In December 25% of the firm's staff -16 employees - were axed in a restructuring. Those lay-offs were in addition to the departure of 31 employees earlier in the year, amid much grumbling about Clinkle's young boss.

According to Bloomberg, former Yahoo executive Chi-chao Chang lasted just one day in his job as Clinkle vice president of engineering. Other former employees told the wire that problems at the start-up can be traced to Duplan's unpredictable leadership.

Yet, despite the turmoil, the company has scored another investment of "several million dollars" from the Stanford-StartX fund.